Can't slow down

Bahia Ballena, Costa Rica

 

Like something out of a suspense novel, our part showed up at 6PM, just after my last post. The yard manager delivered it to us, on the boat, in person.

 

It appears to be an exact match for the old unit. For some reason I was half expecting it to be the wrong size or something worse. I guess I worry too much. I had the old oil cooler off and the new one installed in under an hour, being extra careful not to screw anything up by over-tightening or some such. I ran the engine and put it in gear to check for leaks and make sure the oil was flowing ok, then once again drained and refilled the transmission with fresh ATF - it has now been flushed 3 times and hopefully should have little trace of seawater in there anymore. I ran it up to temperature and made sure everything looked good before I could possibly get a good night's sleep.

 

In the morning we arranged for our national Zarpe, allowing us to leave Quepos, then around noon we headed over to the fuel dock and topped up the diesel before leaving the marina around 1 PM. We planned to go to Bahia Ballena, only 55 miles away and decided it was easier to do as an overnight passage, arriving at first light today. We anticipated very light winds and expected to motor for much of the way. We were wrong!

 

Shortly after leaving the marina, we hoisted the mainsail, double reefed again, and brought out the Genoa. We had a great beam reach in about 10 knots of wind all afternoon. Since we had lots of time, we tried to extend the sail into the early evening, even though we had almost no wind. For a change we had a bit of a favourable current which helped. Unfortunately we found ourselves drifting into a bunch of local fishing boats, with all their confusing lights and stobes, so we had to motor around them for a couple of hours.

 

Later, a brisk North wind came up and we did some close-hauled tacking back and forth until the winds settled on coming from the NE, allowing us to use a single tack to our destination for the rest of the night. The winds steadily increased until we found ourselves in steady 15 to 20 knots, coming out of the Golfo de Nicoya, which has enough fetch to build up some impressively nasty wind-waves, hitting us from the side. In order to keep our speed down so we did not arrive at Ballena in the dark, I had the sails reefed right down and was deliberately trying to go too close to the wind, close-hauled, somewhat stalling the boat that just wanted to charge ahead. After a bouncy few hours, we entered the bay at around 5:30 AM. We chose to anchor on the north end of the bay, in case those Papagayo winds sneak into here too.

 

Interesting note. This passage is exactly the same length as the one that took us into Quepos. Instead of 4 days. we did this one in 15 hours, almost all under sail, and we were trying to go slow.

 

{GMST}09|44.538|N|84|59.319|W|Bahia Ballena, Costa Rica|Bahia Ballena, Costa Rica{GEND}

 

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